SOUNDS AROUND TOWN: Framingham's Jason Yeager

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

Tuesday

Jan 29, 2019 at 11:44 AMJan 29, 2019 at 11:44 AM

It’s been a few years since Framingham native Jason Yeager played at Amazing Things Arts Center, and even longer since, in his high school days, he was the regular Thursday night pianist at Bella Costa Ristorante. Yeager, 31, now living in Manhattan, is heading back to his old stomping grounds to celebrate the release of “All at Onceness,” the jazz-classical hybrid CD he made with saxophonist Randal Despommier. They’ll be at Amazing Things on Feb. 8, sharing the bill with Mark Shilansky’s Fugue Mill.

But it’s not as if Yeager left town for good when he moved to New York in 2010. He’s regularly in and out of Boston these days, as he’s an assistant professor in the Piano Department at Berklee. He also has a lot going on in New York, where he’s a busy sideman in various groups, he continues shaping an ongoing project titled “Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite,” which he describes as a song cycle inspired by characters from Vonnegut’s books, and he’s getting ready to make his debut at Carnegie Hall, playing solo piano, on April 24.

It appears that Yeager’s uncle made the right choice of a gift for his fourth birthday: a small electronic keyboard.

“I remember playing around on it and coming up my own little improvisations,” said Yeager by phone from his home in Harlem. “I started taking piano lessons when I was 7, and I was trying to write music when I was 8 or 9.”

Those lessons focused on classical, but Yeager had plenty of other listening interests, initially getting a steady diet of classic rock, Motown and various ’60s music, due to his dad regularly tuning to Oldies 103.3 in the car.

“I think I fell in love with the Rolling Stones when I was in kindergarten,” he said. “Then it was Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and the blues, and I eventually found my way to jazz. That tied it all together because it was music that could feature the piano, and was improvisational and exciting as well as being emotionally moving and intellectually stimulating.”

He credits his Rivers Conservatory teacher Dan Loschen, who taught both classical and jazz, for opening up the new world of jazz for him, and for recommending lots of recordings, and to Bob Sinicrope, his teacher at Milton Academy, for “opening up my eyes and ears to a lot of great [jazz] music.”

The Bella Costa gig, which ran through his junior and senior years at Milton Academy, came about when, after one of his ensembles at the school won a competition, Yeager and his family were celebrating at the Framingham restaurant, where they often dined, and his dad casually mentioned to the owner, “You should have Jason sit in sometime.”

“Paul, the owner, said, ‘Yeah, let’s give it a try’,” recalled Yeager. “That’s how it started.”

Yeager’s college studies in the Double Degree Program at Tufts and New England Conservatory earned him degrees in International Relations and Jazz Performance. On top of that, it was how he met his current musical partner Randal Despommier.

“Randy was a master's and doctoral student at New England Conservatory, and we overlapped a little,” said Yeager. “We didn’t actually meet there, but we had a lot of mutual friends, and when he moved to New York a few years after I did, one of them put us in touch. We played one gig together, had a great musical rapport, and started getting together to improvise on classical pieces. Over time, that yielded this repertoire that became the album we’re performing at Amazing Things.”

One of the album’s outstanding tracks is the cleverly titled classical-jazz mashup called “The Rite of Cherokee.”

“We feel that’s sort of emblematic of the spirit of the project, which is to blend musical disciplines in any way we see fit, if it’s musical and exciting and compelling,” said Yeager. “That was Randy’s arrangement where he took excerpts from ‘The Rite of Spring’ and from the jazz standard ‘Cherokee,’ and merged them together. So, it’s ‘Cherokee,’ framed by excerpts from ‘The Rite of Spring’ – kind of Stravinsky meets the Great American Songbook.”

The plan for Amazing Things is for Yeager and Despommier to perform a mix of pieces from “All at Onceness” along with some other original music from each of them. If everything works out, there will be some quartet playing courtesy of the rhythm section from Mark Shilansky’s band, and some duo numbers by Yeager and Despommier.

Then, for Yeager, it’s off to Carnegie Hall in the spring.

It’s for the Sophia Rosoff Concert Series,” he said. “She was a legendary piano teacher in New York who died in 2017 at the age of 93. She was my teacher from 2012 to 2015. I’m playing one of the evenings, and am sharing the stage with Santiago Leibson. We’re each playing a set of solo piano, and we’re doing pairings of classical and jazz pieces. I’m doing a mix of Chopin, Ravel, Mendelsohn and Bartok combined with a couple of my own compositions, a piece by Dizzy Gillespie, and the standard ‘On Green Dolphin Street.’ I’m really honored to play for a series that’s named for a teacher who was so dear to me, and to do this at Carnegie hall is a real thrill.”

Jason Yeager and Randal Despommier

Mark Shilansky's Fugue Mill opens

WHEN: Feb. 8, 8 p.m.

WHERE: Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham

TICKETS: $20 adults; $19 seniors; $17 members; $10 students/children

INFO: 508-405-2787; amazingthings.org

Upcoming concerts and club dates

Feb. 2:

The Band That Time Forget never forgets popular and obscure rock and pop songs from the ’60s, and will play them at The Burren in Somerville. (7 p.m.)

Feb. 5:

British pop-rocker Colin Blunstone (The Zombies) brings a show of old and new tunes to City Winery in Boston. Clarence Bucaro opens. (8 p.m.)